The Rev. Benedict J. Groeschel, a Franciscan priest and author known in New York City for his efforts on behalf of the poor and familiar to a worldwide television audience as the bearded friar who denounced modernism and news reporting on sexual abuse by priests, died on Friday in Totowa, N.J. He was 81.

The Franciscan Friars of the Renewal, a branch of the Franciscan order he helped found in the South Bronx in 1987 to aid poor and homeless people, announced his death, saying he had had a series of strokes in recent years.

Father Groeschel established a many-sided and sometimes contentious public profile during his career as a beloved street priest, civil rights activist, priests’ psychologist, author of religious self-help books and popular host on the Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN), a quasi-official Catholic broadcast system that says it reaches more than 100 million viewers.

Wearing the coarse-wool hooded habit and rope belt of a medieval mendicant, Father Groeschel wrote and spoke passionately to his audience for decades, condemning what he called the hedonism at the core of contemporary culture; sex outside marriage, including masturbation; and a declining level of doctrinal obedience among the faithful.

At the same time, he cut a benevolent figure in the South Bronx, where he lived and worked for many years as a member of St. Crispin’s Friary, the community established by his Franciscan order. (“As a psychologist, I have to say I have a Santa Claus complex,” he told The New York Times in 2007.) He was a presence on the streets by day and on the lecture circuit at night, earning fees that largely paid for the friary’s homeless shelter, food pantry, after-school drop-in center, drug counseling and holiday gift distribution program.

He helped found a pregnancy crisis center, a home for unwed mothers and a treatment facility for wayward teenagers.Beginning in 1973, Father Groeschel was for decades the director of spiritual development for the Archdiocese of New York, a job that drew him into the sexual abuse scandal of the 2000s as a defender of the priesthood.

Beginning in 2002, when a tide of allegations began to emerge, Father Groeschel described the news reports about them as a “media persecution” of the church whose purpose, he told a Yonkers congregation, was “to destroy whatever public influence the church might have.” Many church officials concurred in that view.

In the same speech he said that working with priests as he did, he had seen a side of the story that the newspapers had missed.

“I’ve met with some of those people,” he said, referring to priests accused of abuse, “and they are among the most penitent people I have met in my life. When you pick up the media, you don’t hear about the penitence.”

In 2012, Father Groeschel provoked outrage when he said in an interview that “youngsters” were often to blame when priests abused them. “A lot of the cases, the youngster — 14, 16, 18 — is the seducer,” he told National Catholic Register, a Catholic newspaper owned by EWTN.

A spokesman for the New York Archdiocese immediately denounced the comments as “terribly wrong.”

Father Groeschel soon resigned as host of his weekly program on EWTN, “Sunday Night Prime,” and apologized.

“I did not intend to blame the victim,” he said. “A priest — or anyone else — who abuses a minor is always wrong and is always responsible. My mind and my way of expressing myself are not as clear as they used to be.”

His associates pointed to head injuries he had suffered in a 2004 car accident and the strokes he had had since.

After the accident, he told The Times: “They said I would never live. I lived. They said I would never think. I think. They said I would never walk. I walked. They said I would never dance, but I never danced anyway.”

Benedict Joseph Groeschel was born in Jersey City on July 23, 1933, the eldest of six children of Edward and Marjule Smith Groeschel. He attended Catholic schools and entered the novitiate of the Capuchin Franciscan Friars of the Province of St. Joseph in Huntington, Ind., in 1951. He was ordained a Capuchin, one of the many orders of St. Francis, in 1959, serving first as chaplain at Children’s Village in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.

He earned a master’s degree in psychology from Iona College in New Rochelle, N.Y., in 1964 and a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Teachers College at Columbia University in 1970. He taught pastoral counseling at Iona College and Fordham University.

In the early 1980s, he was selected to prepare a case for Vatican review in support of the canonization of his onetime superior, Cardinal Terence Cooke, documenting what he said was evidence of miracles Cardinal Cooke had performed.

His survivors include two sisters, Marjule Drury and Robin Groeschel, and a brother, Garry.

In a 2007 interview with The Times, Father Groeschel reflected on the wide span of his thinking — from very conservative in religious matters to very activist on issues of social justice. “I used to be a liberal, if liberal means concern for the other guy,” he said. “Now I consider myself a conservative-liberal-traditional-radical-confused person.”